eliasforge/fable-agent-orchestration/investigate-before-fix

Investigate Before Fix

A fix for a cause you have not confirmed is a guess. Confirm first.

Procedure

1. Reproduce the cause at current HEAD, not from a remembered summary or a stale note.
2. Map every reader and writer of the state the fix would touch; enumerate the interleavings the fix would create.
3. Check the premise the fix depends on. If the fix assumes a value, field, or path exists, verify it does before designing against it.
4. Decide:

• Confirmed: build the narrow fix.
• Refuted: the diagnosis was wrong. Report the finding and ship no change. This is a result, not a failure.
• Cannot prove safe: HOLD and write the tradeoff for a human.

Why

The most expensive changes are correct fixes to the wrong problem, and plausible fixes built on an unchecked premise. A refutation that costs one investigation is far cheaper than a merge that has to be reverted — and the premise a fix quietly assumes is exactly the thing an investigation exists to catch.